


walking with a ghost

by mickleborger



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: F/F, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 21:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8464429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: Susan, on Talia, and the different implications of the word 'gone'
(spoilers for 2.19 divided loyalties and 4.20-21 endgame/rising star)





	

i.

I woke up this morning and you were gone.  It's a relief, after so many days of having to see your shiny little badge with its shiny little sneer, to be able to talk the halls without a worry you'll come round the corner, or out the elevator, ready to _reach out_ or whatever it is you Corps types do.  Are you trying to figure me out?  Have you noticed something about me?  I have better things to do than to try and figure _you_ out -- and yet, I find myself thinking of you.  I find myself trying to catch a glimpse of you in the lounge; you’re busy.  I get that.  But somehow the hall in front of my door feels like it’s missing something without you just happening to be walking past.

You seem apologetic when you rush into the elevator and see it’s me, but I’ve never been so giddy about having to hold the door for someone.

ii.

I woke up this morning and you were gone.  I rolled over into a dent in the mattress and no one nudged me to the other side of the bed, and in my confusion I woke up.  I found you in the living room, poring over a document I’m sure you’d meant to go over last night (in my quarters, with a spare toothbrush and a change of clothes, _sure_ ), scrawling chickenscratch notes over napkins that deserved no such treatment.  You’d pulled your hair back into something that could arguably have been called a ponytail, and I remembered the feel of your neck cool and soft against my lips.  I offered you coffee.  You shook your head, not entirely there.  It was a good call; the coffee was remarkably stale.

We didn’t arrange to meet tonight, but I see you looking at me from across the room as if you expect me to come over, and I have nowhere else to be.  Your hair is down again, painstakingly arranged into a shiny white-gold sheet that must take a dedicated effort to maintain and that I know is warm against the skin where my fingers meet my hand.  I sit, and think about telling you how good you looked in that ponytail.

iii.

I woke up this morning and you were gone.  All traces of you.  No more that comb you liked, no more that soap you smelled of, no more those napkins you scribbled on when you couldn’t find paper.  I changed the sheets, I fluffed the pillows and the mattresses and the cushions.  I wiped down the counters.  I rearranged the chairs.  There is nowhere left in these quarters for you to be, nothing I can expect to find you behind.  You are gone.  I felt you leave.  I saw someone who looked like you go out the door and I did not follow, so abruptly did you go.

There is a big empty space in my bed and I can’t even sleep near it; it’s been days and I’ve taken to sleeping on the sofa the way I would on busy weeks when I came back too late and didn’t want to disturb you.  I can’t wait until I stop waking in the middle of the night half-expecting to see you there with that look on your face and a spare blanket in your hands.

My quarters are too big for me and I’m taking extra shifts to avoid being in there without you.  I can’t have breakfast at the same table anymore, because there is no one there and I can hear myself chewing.  I’ve cleared all the little notes out of the pockets and the desks and still I keep expecting a new one to turn up, your writing cramped and barely-legible and unmistakably yours.  You’re not here to leave them anymore.

iv.

I woke up this morning and you were gone.  It’s been two years, and so much has happened, and there is so much for which I could be mourning -- but it’s now, tired and beaten and inexplicably _alive_ , that suddenly it hits me.  You were not there this morning when I woke up on a strange slab of a bed, and you will not be there tonight.  You are gone.

Gone, and though this information isn’t anything new it hits me in the stomach like a well-armored fist.  There is a war outside and a dead man in here and all I can remember is a snarl from long ago but that may as well have been yesterday.  I have things to do.  I have been left behind.  I should not be here.

Gone, and the glass is too fluid against my cheek.  Gone, and the wall is hard against my back, and digs into my shoulder.  Gone, and I am not, and I ache all the way to my marrow as if my bones are stretched and cracked from the leagues between us.

I am heavy, I am hollow, I am crying.  The world is full of noise and for now I have to stop.  My hands are wrung around each other and you aren’t there to cover them with yours.  All love is unrequited.

v.

I woke up this morning and you were gone.

It’s been years, years of looking for you and never finding.  Years of catching a glimpse of a tall blonde at the end of the hall and, though knowing in my gut that you are not there, hoping to see someone other than that fresh young officer who still acts as if this is her first assignment.  Years have blended together in the same haze of missing-you, of hurt too old to be raw but still too keen to forget.  Years of looking at where I expect my life to be going and expecting to see you there, somewhere, before I remember that you never will be.

(I know your eyes were blue, but I don’t know what they looked like.  I know your hands were white, and soft, but I can’t feel your fingers locked with mine anymore.)

I woke up this morning and the free space in my bed wasn’t empty anymore, and the officer’s quarters weren’t short an occupant anymore, and the silence at breakfast wasn’t deafening anymore.  There was no one waiting outside my door.  There was no note  on my table.  There never was.


End file.
